📰 Parliament and its panels
There is a need to rethink the tenurial prescription for reconstitution of Department-related Standing Committees
•The Department-related Parliamentary Standing Committees have a so-called tenure of one year. There was speculation in the media that the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, M. Venkaiah Naidu, is keen on amending the rules to give them a fixed tenure of two years. However, since these are joint committees of the two Houses of Parliament, the Speaker of the Lok Sabha also has to concur.
What the rules say
•According to sub-rule (4) of Rule 331D of the Lok Sabha Rules and sub-rule (3) of Rule 269 of the Rajya Sabha Rules, the term of office of the “members” of the committees shall not exceed one year. Thus, it is the term of office of the members and not that of the committees per se that is one year.
•This tenurial issue has to be looked at against the backdrop of the fact that the Rajya Sabha itself undergoes partial biennial renewal, since one-third of its members retire every two years by virtue of clause (1) of Article 83 of the Constitution. As far as the Lok Sabha is concerned, it has a fixed tenure of five years, unless sooner dissolved. Given these facts, Mr. Naidu’s suggestion is in consonance with the biennial partial reconstitution of the Rajya Sabha.
•In the Rajya Sabha, the annual renewal is only notional; major changes are brought about only after each biennial election. Since the Rajya Sabha biennial elections have taken place only in June 2020, there is little point in going through the re-nomination exercise again now. As far as the Lok Sabha is concerned, the major reconstitution takes place when a new Lok Sabha is elected, that is normally after five years. Since there is a mismatch between the election schedule of the Rajya Sabha (every two years) and the Lok Sabha (every five years), it is only once in 10 years that the requirement of major reshuffle of the Standing Committees in both the Houses is expected to coincide, that is after the second round for the Lok Sabha and the fifth biennial round of the Rajya Sabha.
•Against this backdrop, there is definitely a need to rethink the tenurial prescription for reconstitution of Department-related Standing Committees. Given the different election schedules of the two Houses and since the term is prescribed for the members, there is perhaps no need to mandate the same term for the members of both the Houses.
•The Rajya Sabha Rules prescribe no fixed tenure for all the other Standing Committees of the Rajya Sabha listed therein. The standard prescription relating to the constitution of those committees states that the committee shall hold office until a new committee is nominated and that the casual vacancies in the committee shall be filled in by the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha. As far as the Lok Sabha is concerned, most of its committees listed in the Lok Sabha Rules have a tenure of one year, except a few for which no tenure has been prescribed. It would appear that committees concerned with deliberations of a serious nature were given a term coterminous with that of the House, while others were prescribed annual renewal. The Department-related Standing Committees, which were constituted later in 1993, came to be clubbed with the latter category by the Lok Sabha. The Rajya Sabha followed suit.
•Another fact to be taken note of is that there are 24 Department-related Standing Committees, each with a membership of 31 (10 of the Rajya Sabha and 21 of the Lok Sabha). They can accommodate 240 members of the Rajya Sabha and 504 members of the Lok Sabha. Ministers cannot be members of these committees and some senior members opt out. Thus no eligible and available MP is left out of the membership of these committees. As a matter of fact, members of some parties have to perforce do double duty. It, therefore, stands to reason that once a member is nominated to a committee, based on his expertise and/or preference, he should be allowed to continue till he retires or otherwise discontinues the membership in order that the committee is able to benefit from his experience and expertise.
Different tenures
•The language of the Rules of the two Houses makes it clear that the one-year term is of the members of the committees and not of the committees per se. The Standing Committees are permanent. Hence, there should be no difficulty if the terms of the members of the two Houses on these committees are different, in consonance with the tenure of the Houses themselves. Given these facts, it would stand to reason if the tenure of Department-related Standing Committees is prescribed differently for the two Houses. It may be two years for the Rajya Sabha members and for the Lok Sabha members, it may be coterminous with its life. The Rules could also provide that casual vacancies may be filled in by the Presiding Officers, who may also be empowered to reconstitute the membership of their respective Houses in the committees, if they so desire.
📰 Impediments to equal productivity, dignity
Doing right by disabled professionals is still considered more a favour than as affording them their right to full inclusion
•As a disabled person inhabiting a world designed for the able-bodied, one learns to put up with a lot of indignities that others would consider unacceptable. These include: the everyday pain of being excluded from a whole host of normal life activities, and the challenge of having to constantly find ways of living with equal productivity and dignity as others which the able-bodied often simply do not have to think about. Even so, sometimes, one is overcome by the hot, white anger of something so irredeemably unfair that it cannot be just treated as one of the thousand cuts the disabled face everyday.
Access to a database
•In her speech recently to the National Federation of the Blind, Laura Wolk, the first female disabled law clerk on the U.S. Supreme Court, noted how there exists a massive gap between what blind legal professionals, when provided appropriate tools and resources, are capable of achieving and what they are allowed to achieve, on account of the multiple impediments placed in their path.
•And an incident last week served for me as a painful reminder of two such impediments and of how it feels to be on the receiving end of the kind of irredeemably unfair treatment I referred to earlier.
•A battle I have been waging for some time now has been to make SCC Online, India’s premier legal database used by practising lawyers, accessible to persons with disabilities. This database is the only online supplier of true copies of judgments (which are the only authenticated copies of any judgments accepted in Indian courts, apart from the copies of judgments uploaded on the website of the relevant court).
•SCC Online has myriad accessibility barriers — unlabelled links, search filters which cannot be applied with screen readers, and the text of judgments being inaccessible due to security settings. Thus far, the company running this website has baulked at any attempts to make it more accessible — a response characterised by defensiveness, indifference and sheer insensitivity.
•Therefore, I took to Twitter in the hope of creating a groundswell of demands for SCC to mend its ways. The response I got is emblematic of the belief system that prevents the disabled from realising their full potential. In response to my plea, a person said: “His [sic; how] exactly can that make it more accessible? Set out your suggestions if you want traction. @... are busy helping us win cases.” When I asked him to explain why lawyers like me should not be similarly helped by the platform, he stated: “Tough. Learn to be brief.” Given that SCC Online is a private database, much like private property, the person said, no one has the right to ask that it be made accessible. His first tweet received the endorsement of SCC Online.
•This incident vividly brings to light two fundamental issues that prevent the disabled from leading lives of equal dignity and productivity: an exclusionary mindset and the inability to recognise the disabled as rights-bearing citizens, entitled to demand fair and equal treatment from every service provider, public or private.
An exclusionary mindset
•It has always been my aspiration to be a litigator: nothing about the law excites me more than the prospect of winning a battle of wits in a courtroom. During one of my internships at a leading litigation firm in India, I was unable to get meaningful work. On being informed of this by one of my mentors, the partner at that firm said to the former: “But one thing I should indicate is that usually people with special skills have a harder time coping with litigation and it might not be a bad idea in future to advise them towards the corporate side as that is on the whole, slower paced.”
•In the same vein, the Supreme Court of India held last year, in V. Surendra Mohan vs. State Of Tamil Nadu that ‘Tamil Nadu’s policy, of reserving the post of civil judge only for people whose percentage of blindness does not exceed 40-50%, was rational and reasonable. It ruled that a judicial officer has to possess a reasonable amount of sight and hearing to discharge her functions. It accepted the claim that impaired vision makes it impossible to perform the functions required of judicial officers’.
•The fallacy in this line of thinking is that it starts with the wrong premise. Instead of starting with the premise that a blind person is as much entitled as anyone else to freely choose what profession they wish to pursue, meaning thereby that any barriers on their path must be attenuated, it instead starts on the premise that the existing ways of doing things will always remain the way they are, so tough luck to those whom they exclude.
•As the Supreme Court held last year in the case of B.K. Pavitra vs. Union of India , albeit in a slightly different context: “Our benchmarks will define our outcomes. If this benchmark of efficiency is grounded in exclusion, it will produce a pattern of governance which is skewed against the marginalised. If this benchmark of efficiency is grounded in equal access, our outcomes will reflect the commitment of the Constitution to produce a just social order.”
Compliance on accessibility
•Equally important, in the public imagination, doing right by the disabled is still widely considered a function of the goodness of one’s heart, a favour that constitutes one’s good deed for the day. The project of affording them full inclusion and access is not thought of as their right which everyone must help vindicate. This view is innocent of the 2016 Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act (https://bit.ly/2ZDREDL). Section 46 of the Act requires all service providers, public or private, to comply with the rules on accessibility framed by the Central Government within a period of two years from the date of their promulgation. This two-year period expired in June 2019.
•Until each of us is firmly committed to the idea of implementing the two fundamental changes sketched above, we will continue to live in an environment in which, even as we sing praises of the disabled who achieve success despite the obstacles placed on their path, we do not pause to reflect on what it is that makes it so hard for them to succeed in the first place and what we can do to reverse this state of affairs.
📰 An economic disaster foretold
The reported contraction of the economy is likely an underestimate for reasons of omission and commission
•According to data released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation of the Government of India on August 31, 2020, real quarterly GDP contracted by a whopping 23.9% between April-June 2019 and April-June 2020. This magnitude of real GDP decline is unprecedented since the country started publishing quarterly GDP estimates in 1996. This is an economic disaster, no doubt. But is a bigger one in the offing?
•According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, India’s real GDP contraction between April-June 2019 and April-June 2020 has been the largest among 13 large economies of the world. China is the only country which saw a positive growth of 3.2% in that period. However, even that reported contraction of the Indian economy in all likelihood is an underestimate for reasons of omission of statistical information and commission of policies of insidious intent.
An underestimated disaster
•The unorganised sector forms a significant part of the Indian economy. According to some estimates, it accounts for 45% of output and 93% of employment of the working population.
•While data collection methods have undoubtedly improved over time, coming up with reliable estimates of value added in the unorganised sector is challenging. Typically, government statisticians combine information about value added per worker from enterprise surveys with information about employment from employment-unemployment surveys to generate estimates of output in the unorganised sector.
•This methodology is applied in benchmark years in which the enterprise and employment surveys are conducted, typically once every five years. The benchmark estimates are only available for those years. For other years, the estimate of output in the unorganised sector is extrapolated from benchmark year estimates using information about other indicators like the index of industrial production, the wholesale price index, and tax collection. By its very nature, such a methodology generates doubtful estimates for non-benchmark years even in the best of times. They have become misleadingly unreliable due to the sudden shock of the lockdown imposed by the Central government to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
•The lockdown has hit the unorganised sector disproportionately hard, as did the previous shock of demonetisation. As a result, standard methods of estimating the output of the unorganised sector by extrapolation and quantifying its contribution to the whole economy overestimates the income generated by it during the pandemic. The actual situation is much worse. The benchmark estimates of output refer to some pre-COVID-19 year and information on other variables like tax collection has been rendered far less reliable for this period.
•We are told that employment in the last quarter has increased somewhat, but these are mostly self-employed persons who have now returned to the market place but earn far less because customers’ purchasing power has significantly declined. While they can technically be counted as being employed in terms of working time, they can only be considered grossly underemployed in terms of income earned. And this gap between employment and earnings is likely to grow without injection of massive purchasing power by the government directly into the unorganised sector.
Can agriculture help?
•The sectoral pattern of real GDP decline provides important information. The three sectors which contracted the most were construction (at -50.3%), trade, hotels, transport, communication and services related to broadcasting (at -47%) and manufacturing (at -39.3%). Large parts of the first two fall in the unorganised sector underlining how the lockdown has disproportionately hit the non-agricultural unorganised sector.
•The only sector which did not contract was agriculture, and that was because of a good monsoon year. It grew between April-June 2019 and April-June 2020 at 3.4%. However, in the present circumstances, agricultural growth will not help much in economic recovery. Agricultural output has risen, but agricultural income will not rise correspondingly due to the same lack of purchasing power in the unorganised sector for buying agricultural products. We are likely to face again, perhaps on a bigger scale, the same obscene situation of foodgrains piling up while millions go hungry.
A still bleaker future
•India’s economic woes did not start with the pandemic. Its economy has been slowing down for the last couple of years. The year-on-year change in real GDP for the economy shows that the growth rate of quarterly real GDP has been slowing down at least since the fourth quarter of 2017, declining from 7.6% in Q4 2017 to 3.3% in Q1 2020.
•Ill-conceived measures of the Central government have harmed the economy. In November 2016, demonetisation provided the first negative shock. The second one, in the form of the Goods and Services Tax in July 2017, came even before the economy had time to recover from the first shock. All this played out on the canvas of an economy where financial fragility was increasing due to unaddressed problems in the banking sector. Increasing financial fragility coupled with negative policy shocks halted the trajectory of rising growth, and the lockdown has sent the patient who was already ailing into a coma.
•Can the economy recover in the foreseeable future? In theory, yes, but in practical terms, no. The reason? The government is not interested in averting an economic crisis for the poor. It is interested in ensuring that the handful of its industrialist friends do well irrespective of the state of the economy. And by all accounts they are doing well. Mukesh Ambani, who has now become the fourth richest person in the world, is only growing richer by the day; Adani too is progressing at a highly satisfactory rate, monopolising airport development. This rosy picture should not be spoiled by irrelevant facts like a 23.9% contraction of the real economy.
•And of course, more of the same is likely to come — not to transform but to strengthen this reality. The government has just declared in Parliament that it cannot pay compensation to the families of those migrant workers who died because it does not have the relevant data. Isn’t a bigger crisis in the offing?
